Pakistan president pledges to quit army

President Pervez Musharraf today said he would give up his uniform and become a civilian president in the face of protests at his decision to impose emergency rule.

"I am determined to execute this third stage of transition fully and I'm determined to remove my uniform once we correct these pillars in judiciary and the executive and the parliament," he told foreign diplomats in comments broadcast on state-run Pakistan Television.

The US president, George Bush, tonight called on Gen Musharraf to hold elections and relinquish his army post "as soon as possible".

During the day, Pakistani police launched a harsh crackdown on the first street protests since Gen Musharraf assumed sweeping emergency powers last Saturday. Police fired teargas and baton-charged a crowd of 2,000 lawyers at the largest protest in the southern city of Lahore.

Up to 1,800 people have been detained across the country since the weekend, an interior ministry official said.

The former prime minister Narwaz Sharif's opposition party says the authorities have rounded up around 2,300 of its supporters. Mr Sharif was deported when he tried to return to Pakistan in September.

The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, responded to concern from overseas - including Britain - and insisted that elections scheduled for January would take place as planned.

"Our thinking about the election is that it will be held according to schedule," Mr Aziz told a news conference. The country's national assembly will be dissolved on November 15, and elections will be held within 60 days, the attorney general said, according to Reuters.

The lawyers in Lahore tried to repel police with stones and tree branches, as at least 250 were detained from the protest alone, some bundled into vans bleeding from head wounds.

Clashes between police and lawyers were also reported in Karachi, Peshawar, Multan and Rawalpindi, where police sealed court buildings.

At a news conference, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, urged Gen Musharraf to follow through on past promises to "take off his uniform".

"I want to be very clear. We believe that the best path for Pakistan is to quickly return to a constitutional path and then to hold elections," she said.

The British government today called for reassurance that elections planned for January would go ahead. The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the decision to declare emergency rule was not in the interest of Pakistan nor in the interest of fighting against terrorism.

"This is a defining moment for Pakistan and its leadership and the whole world will be watching how the transition to democracy is re-established," he told reporters.

The United Nations became the latest organisation to condemn the imposition of martial law and call for the release of those detained.

"A state of emergency should only be used to deal with a dire security threat to the nation, not to undermine the integrity and independence of the judiciary," Louise Arbour, the UN's chief rights official, said in a statement.

A spokesman for the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, said so far 67 members of her party had been arrested.

Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the influential supreme court bar association, remains in Adiala Jail near Rawalpindi; another lawyer called the Guardian from a plane about to leave for Kabul, saying she was fleeing possible arrest.

The former chief justice Muhammad Iftikhar Chaudhry, who led protests against Gen Musharraf earlier this year and was sacked on Saturday, remained under house arrest in Islamabad. Since Saturday, Gen Musharraf has banned public meetings and suspended fundamental rights, closed down television stations and rounded up hundreds of opposition supporters, lawyers and human rights activists.

Independent TV news networks remained off the air, although some could be viewed by satellite or the internet. Police raided and sealed a printing press in Karachi belonging to Pakistan's largest media group, blocking publication of its Urdu-language evening newspaper, Awam (People), the Jang Group editor, Mahmood Sham, said.

Troops manned sandbagged positions around government buildings in the capital. Although some businesses opened, streets were generally quiet.

Rumours of a counter-coup against Gen Musharraf circulated widely among journalists and lawyers. "It is a joke of the highest order," Gen Musharraf told Reuters from the presidency building in Islamabad, where he met more than 80 foreign diplomats to explain his decision.

"He seems to be pretty much in control at the moment," said one diplomat, who said his country's main concern was to find out how long the emergency would last. Concerns about growing instability caused the main Karachi stock exchange to fall by more than 4%.

Although Gen Musharraf says the emergency is needed to fight growing Islamist militancy including a spate of suicide bombings, a senior Musharraf aide told the Guardian the crisis was actually triggered by fears that the supreme court was about to rule his re-election illegal.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q party, said a friendly supreme court judge leaked the information to the government last Wednesday.

"He said the verdict may be unanimous, so we had no choice," said Mr Hussain. "The debate was whether to impose emergency before or after [the court ruling]."

Mr Aziz, who had previously assured the public that Gen Musharraf would "always respect the constitution", admitted on Sunday that the government had initially detained between 400 and 500 people as a "preventative measure".

An editorial in Dawn newspaper said that future denials from Mr Aziz or Gen Musharraf would be a "waste of newspaper space".

Britain and the US have promised to review their assistance to Pakistan in the light of the unfolding crisis. The US has given $11bn (£5.2bn) in mostly military aid since 2001.